Barleyman

Still waiting for the 1.04 version and bought my copy when 1.02 came out. Plenty of other stuff to waste time on while this one ripens.

Oh well. Obvious solution would be more fine-grained "action spot" grid. I suppose eye candy department is mostly sitting on the GPU. I wonder what kind of performance hit we'd get with, say, 2x2 grid. That'd be 16x more data to shift and what with relative spotting.. As CMSF doesn't play nice with dual cores anyhow, I doubt they want to target this into too-high CPU segment.. I wouldn't mind occasional spotting weirdness as in CMBB head-of-the-pin spotting meant you had JSII jumping to sight when it was halfway from behind that barn. But shooting throught solid objects is bad. At least the much-vaunted ballistic modelling should "know" you cannot shoot trough ground even if LOS engine says you can see through sand.. Perhaps the best solution would be to run a more fine-grained LOS check between any two objects the "coarse" LOS code says can see each other. Cuts down on the CPU time as it was.

Because of the "action spot" spotting mechanism. Commander does not have LOS to the action spot of the hex the tank is occupying even if part of the 3D model is visible. That's why we're asking for visual cue to the action spots so we can determine when cover is cover is cover. Done correctly, such grid could double as a terrain-grid, you know..

CRT at 60Hz is yech. Refresh lock tool is good but if it works like it used to, it's not really 100% universal. Basically it tells windows your monitor *can't* use 60Hz so windows uses something more reasonable. Some games do not use windows to set Hz so it won't work. Some games actually choke if they don't see their favourite eye-strain mode. Powerstrip actually sits on the background and forces the display to the refresh rate you want on-the-fly but it's not freeware.

Every day is Day One!

bump How's that whitepaper coming along on how LOS actually works in CMx2 engine games?

Never despair, I'm sure it'll evolve into name calling and personal attacks in no time

Znrglp! COUGH! GACK! ****e, hate swallowing my tongue! Check something called "Stalingrad" someday..

Would be nice to get final word on this to clear up how the simulation actually works.. Maybe duct tape Charles to a chair and make him drink decaf until he coughs up the details? If LOS is indeed tied to some "action point" grid distributed on even 8x8 spaces, it'd be good to have on/off visual clue to that grid!

Thread conveniently hijacked.. So what about toggleable visual clue to LOS grid and/or terrain?

I wonder if it'd be feasible to have variable LOS grid so building/object/terrain edges and crests/dips would have larger concentration of "action points"..

For me CMBB was most interesting by far; One reason is that the war was actually decided in east front -41/-42 and the writing was on the wall for nazis by -43. Other big reason is that the engine actually improved in many and relevant ways CMBO->CMBB .. There was no going back to CMBO after all the new tools in your disposal such as covered arcs, hull down, shoot + scoot and so forth. CMAK on the other hand, I didn't get since afrika is not very interesting as IRL it was a sideshow most relevant for tying up a disproportionate amount of commonwealth troops.. Plus, as others said, the vehicles, terrain, tactics, ho-hum..

Hmm. What's "location of the unit" exactly? Some arbitary point, center of mass or maybe model-specific point? Can there be more than 1 for vehicles? Is the action spot tied to the UNIT or TERRAIN? In other words, when our bradley drives along the road, it carries it's own "action spot" with it or it moves from action point to action point that are static "hexes" on the map? And for that bradley-behind-building example, LOF doesn't matter if you do not have LOS, yes? So for bad guys to shoot at the bradley they need to have LOS to it's "action point"? But after it's been spotted they can take shot at any point of the 3D object, even if they lose LOS to the action point?

..Especially as it has same gun as T-72. Now some Tungsten ammo goodness on the other hand..

Wait a second.. First you say LOS is tracked on a 8x8 grid, fine. But then you go around and say it matters if you can see 0.5m of tank from beyond a house corner. Wouldn't that be more that the front of the vehicle is in fact 0.5m inside an 8x8 spotting hex that the bad guy has LOS on but rest of the vehicle is inside another 8x8 spotting hex that is NOT visible? </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> A B C D E 1 | |*| | ---------- 2 | |h|h| ---------- 3 | |h|h| ---------- 4#| | | | * good guy # bad guy h house </pre>

Color-spill -style LOS-tool.

Not quite. Combat mission did very well in Finland, therefore it's sold for 39.95.. You can buy it from play.com for 28€ including shipping, thought. I just got the DL version so Charles has enough coffee money to eventually patch worst offenders into submission..

Not if you ordered it from europe you didn't. Since paradox uses 1 USD = 1 EURO exchange rate, BFC download is about 6.50e cheaper for european customers. In other words, it's more economical for amis to DL paradox european webshop and for european wargame geeks to dl from BFC in US! How weird is that?

1.02 patch is out and my order for CM:SF is in. That's the way it works, boys..

Care to post a reference which law exactly is being violated..? I'm sure you're aware Geneva convention says nothing about ammunition and the Hague convention only mentions soft-nosed ammo. 12.7mm AP ammo causes excessive suffering because..? Yup, it's excessive, inefficient and wasteful to pepper grunts with a light-weight AP/AA gun as 7.62 can do the same job better most of the time. But excessive suffering..? You get killed more dead from 12.7mm or something? If anything you're less likely to suffer for long time unlike, say, after getting hit by a 5.56mm ..

Fully 3-dimensional volumetric LOS tool would be nice. You know, click on a spot and you get "water spill" shaded area that shows where you can see from that spot (and who can see YOU!) Or maybe show ground in different color or somesuch. "Grid display ON/OFF" would be very welcome too.

Hey, nobody asked you to elect said upper command echelon for a 2nd term.

It took me about half an hour to go thru process of mouseclick - delete - pagedown 196 times in acrobat (full) to kill the background pictures. After that I used foxit pdf reader to print the manual with black font. I suspect to do that would take the guy who used pagemaker to make the original manual about 30 seconds.

As far as I have understood, that's not true. During the second Chechenyan conflict they again went into Grozny with armored units and subsequently got massacred by the light infantry with RPGs. However, second time around one of the commanders had a clue and he sent in an infantry division (or equivalent) after the initial failure. Those guys took the city block by block, as you'd expect, assisted by generous helping of levelling the city by arty and direct fire. 125mm HE grenade is *nasty* hitting a stacked apartment complex if you do not have to worry about collateral damage. Most of the atrocities have been committed by the local death squads after the initial military op was over. They have lovely culture of kidnapping and demanding ransom on both insurgent and goverment side. Assasination of the "president" changed nothing, power even did stay on the family. Not recommended as a vacation spot. I think even red cross and other guys pulled out of there.